I went ahead and straight up denied access to specific countries from which spam originates. I am not sure if this denies specific SPAM only ip addresses or if it denies access to those countries alltogether.... and I don't care. We don't seem to have any active users from there anyways.

Hope it helps. Will add to list as new spam appears from different places.

Having run a few phpbbs a couple of years back, I can say it spoils the fun of running a site. We resorted to the same method you suggested of filtering batches of IPs unfortunately blocking out some great people from the regions. I was considering loading a stopspam mod for the board but I never got that deep into the admins.

the "what color is grass?" question is asked to new subscribers. I've seen another forum use a more difficult question which requires the user to visit a specific forum link and cull some information from it to answer correctly. that might be a better option. it is pretty sad that not many people use this forum, and it's really charitable and respectable of ruso to keep it up in spite of that.

thanks ruso!

one strange thing i've noticed about this forum is that my replies to posts tend to disappear a few days later. i'm not sure if this is due to some anti-spam measure, but it's lame nonetheless.

Guys, let me explain the problem a little. The spam accounts on this forum are not simply bots. The bots are stopped with the crappy three questions in the beginning. I believe the spam accounts are actually PEOPLE who manually sign up and post the same topic on many forms.

This is why there is no RECAPCHA or more questions.... we, the humans, can solve it.

I upgraded the forum today to the latest version. I may try out RECAPCHA for a bit, but once again I'm not so certain it will help any.

Having run a few phpbbs a couple of years back, I can say it spoils the fun of running a site. We resorted to the same method you suggested of filtering batches of IPs unfortunately blocking out some great people from the regions. I was considering loading a stopspam mod for the board but I never got that deep into the admins.